Peter Foster is the Telegraph's US Editor based in Washington DC. He moved to America in January 2012 after three years based in Beijing, where he covered the rise of China. Before that, he was based in New Delhi as South Asia correspondent. He has reported for The Telegraph for more than a decade, covering two Olympic Games, 9/11 in New York, the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami, the post-conflict phases in Afghanistan and Iraq and the 2011 Fukushima disaster in Japan.

Beijing bikers now second-class citizens

It’s been nearly a month now since I took to my bike in Beijing and I can’t say I’ve regretted it for a second.

It may take very slightly longer to get around, but my new travel times are absolutely dependable. No more waiting in interminable traffic jams just because they’ve closed Chang’an Avenue because some foreign dignitary is in town.

I have one significant beef however. Why is it, in this era of heightened environmental consciousness, that we pedallers are treated like second class citizens every time we visit a conference centre or major hotel?

Right now I’m sitting at the Park Hyatt Hotel in Beijing at the Financial Times’s China Energy and Environment Summit listening to eminent folk discoursing on how China is (or is not) going to help save the planet, and how we might make a few quid out of that process.

Getting here was a nightmare. Every time I tried to approach the tower in which the hotel is housed, I was furiously shooed away by the security guards guarding the access roads to the hotel.

Those, of course, were all reserved for the fleets of Audis and beamers with blacked out windows conveying delegates to their carbon intensive seats.

Bikes – even my gleaming aluminium racing machine, the two-wheeled equivalent of an Audi TT – were clearly considered an embarrassment. Although seeing a foreigner in his suit and tie riding them always throws the locals a bit.

Only after three circuits of the building did I find the access point for two-wheelers which, since it is used almost exclusively by the waiters, cooks and bottlewashers who work in the hotel, was very much the ‘tradesman’s entrance’.

The security man charged with guarding the bikes down in the bowels of the building looked very surprised to see a foreigner arriving. I scoped out the bikes and, judging by the collection of wobbly-wheeled boneshakers on display, not many other delegates arrived on two wheels.

When did bikes become and embarrassment in Beijing of all places?

In these environmentally conscious times, hotels should have bike racks outside and relegate all the car drivers to a park and ride several hundred metres away so they can walk in the freezing cold to the lobby like I did. As Chairman Moa said, nothing like ‘tasting bitterness’ to change habits.

More seriously, I was in conversation with an old Beijing resident about how the city has changed over the last 10 years, and the first thing she came up with was the lack of bikes on the road these days.

As I cycle to work (icily today) I note that Beijing cyclists now fall into two basic categories: poor folk on bone-shakers still not well-off enough to afford an electric scooter, or ‘yuppies’ like me (Chinese and foreign) whizzing into Guo Mao (China World Trade Centre) on their ‘Trek’ and ‘Giant’ dream machines.

There’s lots of talk about making Beijing more environmentally friendly, but one really beneficial thing they could do is take measures to bring the bikes back – starting with the wretched, snobby five star hotels.